Mobile BI Deployed by Less Than One in Ten Companies Using Business Intelligence Software

October 11, 2011

Tools

Just one of many interesting findings on usage and adoption of business intelligence technology in The BI Survey 10, published this week by BARC

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- The BI Survey 10, a major new report based on the findings of the world’s largest survey of business intelligence (BI) end-users, reveals that only 8% of companies using BI software are currently accessing reports on mobile devices.

"With all the buzz around mobile BI at the moment, I expect that many people will be surprised that it has such a low adoption rate,” said Barney Finucane, lead author of The BI Survey 10.

“But I think there are two major reasons for this low figure,” continued Finucane. “Firstly, the heaviest consumers of BI tend to be the folks who spend most of their time deskbound, such as business analysts and report designers. And secondly, the prime candidates for mobile BI usage, namely high-level, jet-setting executives, are often too busy to be running reports on the move and prefer to be fed them by someone else.”

However, while uptake is still relatively low, 22% of respondents indicated that they are planning to implement mobile BI in the next twelve months, and a further 27% are planning to implement the technology in the long run.

Another surprising finding was that company politics is now far and away the most frequent problem encountered in BI projects, with 20% of BI buyers citing it as an issue. This eclipses last year’s most commonly reported problem, poor data quality (16%), and administrative problems (15%).

Elsewhere, 59% of BI buyers said they had conducted a multi-product competitive evaluation before purchasing, up over 10% on last year. And those buyers were found to have realized significantly more business benefits from their BI implementations than organizations that had only formally evaluated a single product, or none at all.

The BI Survey 10 attracted nearly 3000 responses and this year’s report analyzes a record twenty-six products from vendors including IBM, Microsoft (MSFT), Oracle (ORCL), SAP, SAS, MicroStrategy (MSTR) and QlikTech (QLIK).

And for the first time in its ten-year history, The BI Survey 10 introduces a powerful new online tool - The BI Survey Analyzer - that enables users to perform their own custom analysis of the Survey data, and compare BI products across numerous criteria such as performance, support, agility and speed of implementation.

“The introduction of The BI Survey Analyzer gives our customers unprecedented flexibility to access the data that they need to support their BI projects,” said Melanie Mack, BARC’s Head of Research. “We believe this is a unique approach and enhances the value of The BI Survey 10 to companies evaluating BI solutions.”

Business Application Research Center (BARC) is a leading independent software industry analyst delivering product evaluations, conferences, market research and consulting to customers worldwide.